Case Study – The Power of Email Automation

The Shift of Email  – “You’ve Got Mail” to Sophisticated Marketing Tool

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn’t that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase – “You’ve got mail!” While email began to be developed in 1978-79, it became a household function in the early 90s.

Email immediately brought a new, faster, better way for people to communicate with one another, and businesses joined in the fray from the start. Email was originally developed to be an electronic version of the way that businesses already communicated with one another. This article in Times magazine interviews the inventor of email (he was only 14) and he goes into detail about how and why he developed it. It’s a really interesting read.

We’ve come a long way since then adding instant messaging, then cell phones and text messaging, and finally today we have the mix of social media, video calling, and the list goes on. While email is still used by most people on a daily basis whether for business or personal communication, my experience is that most people already see it as archaic. As technology advances, we are now quick to adapt to the next best thing.

Even so, email continues to be one of the best, easiest, cheapest ways to communicate, especially for businesses. Email isn’t dead! The way we use it has shifted, that’s for sure. While you may have initially used email to send pictures of the kids to family or emails to your colleagues within your intranet, now we use email for everything. Every time you enter your email on a landing page, newsletter sign up, and the like, you are opting in for that particular service.

Emails are also now more automated than ever. While you may still write emails personally to family and colleagues, most organizations emails are carefully thought out, written in advance, and then sent automatically. This is called email automation.

As a digital marketing agency, email has remained one of our top focuses, and in this past year has become our main focus. We have realized through data analysis and trial and error with our clients that email is one of the quickest and cheapest ways to market to their client base.

We work with SharpSpring as a Silver Level Certified Partner, the only one in the state of Nevada. While sending a quick newsletter or an email blast to your customer list may be easy, a strategic email automation campaign can be a lot more complicated. And we’ve spent the time researching, launching, analyzing, and adjusting our email campaign process to claim the title of experts in this field. We’ve utilized our partner resources through SharpSpring, as well as other expert advice from the industry. We swear by Ryan Deiss’ Invisible Selling Machine and have used that as a basis for our email campaigns while adjusting the process to fit our clients’ needs.

We recently collaborated with SharpSpring to create a case study on one of our more successful email campaigns. Social Media Investors, LLC, a small business in Las Vegas, NV, reached out to us for help in marketing to a large email database of around 20,000, collected over 5 years at networking events, meetings, and the like. Social Media Investors aims to help small businesses with a small marketing budget utilize social media to their advantage through a developed management platform. The question was, how do we get this platform in front of 20,000 people? After multiple strategy meetings with the client, we set out to create the following email automation:

• Free trial campaign: 8 emails
• Post sign-up, upgrade to ‘pro’ campaign: 8 emails
• Upgrade from ‘pro’ to ‘premium’ campaign: 7 emails

This campaign took a few days to write and set up, but the idea was that once launched, it would work quietly in the background promoting his services while he focused on client interaction. We had some great learnings from this campaign, here’s an excerpt from the case study:

Challenge 1: Ensure that all of the leads in the client’s database were solid, qualified leads. SMI had collected many leads over the years, so at this point, many were no longer active. Within its first week, the campaign came close to going over the spam threshold. SMI took a look at which leads were not engaging and removed those from its list, which greatly improved engagement rates for the subsequent emails in the campaign.

Challenge 2: The amount of prep time required to set up a massive campaign such as this one. It’s important to be strategic in the planning phases to ensure the campaign will essentially run itself and that minimal work will be needed after the launch. This involves gathering and setting up the right content in your emails and landing pages, and then formulating each task in the automation to ensure leads are properly captured through landing pages and ending up in the sales pipeline, exactly where you want them. The agency had to make some iterative adjustments throughout the campaign, but it learned how to better prepare fully for future campaigns.

This campaign is still running, and the results have been tremendous! Read the entire case study here:

A Campaign That Converted: How a Small Business Increased Profits by 64%

Email automation can save so much time and money, no matter what type of organization you are operating. If you’re ready to learn more, contact us and let’s set up a meeting. We’d love to share more about email automation, SharpSpring, and see how the two might benefit your organization.